Mrs May Loses It

Out in the playground at the end of the school day one afternoon, a well-meaning bystander tells Mrs May how lucky she is to be a teacher, how teaching isn’t really a job, it’s a vocation, particularly with all those Long Holidays teachers get, why, it’s hardly like working at all!

Mrs May considers her response.

Mrs May would usually nod and smile beatifically while fantasising about the perpetrator being forced into sole responsibility for Class 2A and their many and varied rogue bodily fluids.

Not today.

Today, Mrs May announces to said well-meaning bystander that no, she isn’t fucking lucky, she’s the victim of a cruel and unusual punishment meted out by successive governments, who decided that inspiring a love of learning in the children she teaches is frankly superfluous to requirements, and that she should instead be focusing her time drilling six and seven year olds on the correct way to identify graphemes and suffixes and subordinates (which Mrs May had frankly always previously assumed was a military ranking) and god forbid that they show an interest in any topic which doesn’t fall strictly within the boundaries of the National Curriculum, they must be immediately told to be quiet and get back to creating their noun phrases, which Mrs May has always referred to as simply SENTENCES, but who is she to assume she knows anything any more.

Today, Mrs May tells the appalled and desperately-searching-for-an-exit innocent bystander that those so called Long Holidays are typically spent desperately attempting to cram in every single pointless form filling exercise that the Government insists upon all teachers doing yet very nicely provides them with not a single timetabled moment to actually carry it out, therefore necessitating not only their Long Holidays but also Every Other Moment Of Their Spare Time being filled with report writing and lesson planning and marking and pointless form filling, and that the day Mrs May once got to bed before eleven o’clock at night having completed all of her paperwork for the day she practically had the fucking bunting out in celebration.

And today, Mrs May tells the frankly traumatised and wishing-they’d-never-opened-their-mouth well-meaning bystander that, if they think teaching is a fucking vocation, then they should try having a poo in a shoe handed to them, as one unnamed but particularly odious member of Class 2A did to them yesterday, and see then whether teaching feels like a fucking vocation or not.

With a final rallying war cry, Mrs May sails out of the playground, children, parents and teachers watching her in a mix of horror and awe, heads for her battered old Mini, drives herself home and drinks tequila neat from the bottle whilst Googling jobs as a full time Director of Plays.

Mrs May will be in enormous trouble with SLT when she turns up for work on Monday…but it will have been worth it.